Scenes From My Surrogacies: A Memoir in the Making

On the long, dark ride back home, I was thinking about my newly pregnant friend. In the flurry of activities associated with moving, a new job, and planning a road trip, it had slipped my mind that it had been a few weeks since Doug and I had our afternoon of oh-my-God-we’re-grateful-to-still-be-alive-sex. Which looking back on it, seems crazy that I wasn’t counting the days given that day’s positive ovulation predictor test, but we’d been having precisely timed sex for almost two years already and that fact overshadowed my optimism that we’d actually get pregnant this time.

But as Doug drove along through the night and we passed time by talking about all the changes happening in our lives at that time, I started counting days, pressing my fingers one by one into my leg so as not to lose track of the days that had gone by. Two weeks and a day had passed and if I took a pregnancy test when we got home it might show a positive result.

But it didn’t.

I went on with my week, juggling two jobs, driving between the house we were living in and the house we were renovating, and coordinating all the contractors who were doing the work. Not to mention spending plenty of time sitting hunched over on the bed, calculator in hand and running various sets of numbers to figure out how much we could spend on making the new house livable and how much we had to save for fertility treatments.